Hancock has secured several investors to develop the project, including Marubeni Corporation, Korean steel maker POSCO and STX.

Korte will leave Paladin on May 24, to be succeeded by Alan Rule, presently CFO of Mount Gibson Iron.

Korte will be Roy Hill’s first CFO and for him it is the chance to get involved in ramping up the business to an operating mine, with production expected to start in 2013.

“The scale of the opportunity [is attractive],” he says. Roy Hill includes 2.4 billion tonnes of iron ore resource and it is expected the mine will produce 55 million tonnes per annum of “lump and fines” for 30 years.

Given the size of the project, his immediate task will be to finalise the debt funding, but beyond that it is hiring the people and setting up the systems to run a company in a fast growth phase.

“I will be setting up and establishing all of the financial processes and systems to operate the business efficiently,” he says. “I will also need to build a very high quality finance team. There are some people in place, but I will have to build that team to a far higher level than it is now.”

At Paladin has involved a combination of setting up new operations at the Kayelekera Mine in Malawi to a cost cutting program after losses continued after spot prices for uranium fell following the Fukishima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011.

A decade ago, Korte was based in South Africa, from where he set up a number of mining operations in southern Africa.

Prior to the Japanese tsunami the company had also reported losses, in part due to high capital costs of setting up of new mines in Africa.

While production has been at record levels, the prices the company has been able to get for the uranium have not covered costs.

“Post that event I needed to get the board and the CEO to accept that we needed to go through cost optimisation,” said Korte.

The company has also been paying off debt by selling “non-production assets”, says Korte and is looking at bringing in venture capital partners to reduce leverage in the balance sheet.

Paladin also mines uranium in Queensland, Northern Territory and Canada.